73. Kitty – Return to Auschwitz 1979

As I write this piece, I turn to the IMDb and am left ashamed. It’s there, of course, but no-one has voted on it, seen it or commented on it. Turn to Nuit et Brouillard, to Shoah or to Laurence Rees’ Auschwitz, and you’ll find votes and comments aplenty, but nothing for Peter Morley’s piece. When one considers the plethora of Holocaust films out there, that this priceless document should be forgotten seems almost unforgiveable.

One can understand that it took me 20 years from discovering of its existence to tracking down a print, via dear old Youtube of all places. Naturally the style of shooting has dated a little bit, but as testimony, this is one of the most priceless pieces of television you will ever see. Producer Peter Morley approached Yorkshire TV with the idea of having Kitty Hart return to the place of infamy where she’d been for over two years. Her doctor son Peter would be there to offer emotional support. Kitty had been working as a radiologist in Birmingham for many years, and had written a small memoir in 1961, but her visit would act as a sort of exorcism of demons she had submerged and suppressed within her for nearly 35 years. The piece opens with the story of how her family, the Felixs, left the small town to Bielsko near the Polish border just before the invasion of Poland, and were eventually caught and shipped off to Auschwitz (ironically only a few miles from Bielsko) in 1943.

The first thing that strikes one as Kitty and David pull up to the infamous watch tower and railway tracks of Auschwitz-Birkenau is how deserted it is. Now, in the post Schindler’s List and The Pianist era, there would be hundreds of visitors, but for Kitty and Peter the place is largely quite eerily deserted. Morley keeps his camera at a safe following distance, so we see Kitty and Peter from behind, and as such watch Kitty’s footsteps, as she tries to get her bearings. Every few strides she comes close to breaking down, but stiffens the sinews: “when you have children”, she tells David, “you can bring them here and tell them about this. I owe this to all the people that have died. I’m sure I do. Thirty members of your family died here – your grandfather, your grandmother, my family, all my school friends, everybody out of our home town. All your father’s family, everybody’s ashes are here…” David asks her about her arrival: “it was night,the whole place was lit up when I came here and there was a kind of smell of roasting meat. And you thought “God, surely they can’t be roasting a lot of meat here?” and there was a peculiar glow in the distance…”

In essence Peter acts as interviewer, Morley’s discreet camera merely records their experiences, one of reawakening memories, the other of just awakening disbelief. She stops besides an open gate, remembering how if you went through that gate you lived a little longer, but if you went straight on you were dead within hours. She recalls the full-piece orchestra beside the gate to greet the workers before setting off in search of the infamous Block 25, from which the dead were picked prior to being sent to the various crematoria. She finds Block 20, where she existed from day to day, often ingeniously. What seemed horrific tasks like carrying bodies and being on Scheiss-Commando duty (which speaks for itself) she recounts as comparatively pleasant duties in that you didn’t have to go outside the compound. Survival for a girl who was 16 when she arrived and 18 when liberated, was dependant on being able to blend into the background, to go unnoticed. She describes how one bowl was her toilet, wash basin and food bowl, and with no chance to clean, her horror at having to help load her friends onto a death cart, and how she narrowly escaped Mengele’s white gloves. Finally, she finds the burning pits where hundreds of thousands were disposed of and finds the ashes barely beneath the surface. What strikes most awe is how Kitty tries to keep herself matter-of-fact about it to try and show her son how she had to see everything to survive, not merely going face to face with the horrors, but with the horror of her own mentality, and the suppressing of her own humanity, to survive. 39334 will remain burned in your memory for life.

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4 Responses

Wonderful write-up on an interesting discovery. I went through a similar trip to the one you mention in the first paragraph of your piece, Allan. I was in disbelief that it had no votes on IMDb (my 8 out of 10, I’m guessing, must be one of the first 5 or so) and then glad to find it on youtube of all places, as you mention.
I have two things to say about this TV documentary
1. I appreciate the braveness and the quality of the stories that she tells as she goes through Auschwitz, but I think that it may be a richer experience to actually read her memoirs and her later books that she has released. Not to put the film down, as it seems to be a great introduction to a character like her and her ouvre.
2. I was appaled by the comments in the videos, it seems like any video that is about the Shoah, you find people that try to deny that it existed, and Jesus Christ, it did exist… we are not making a claim that maybe the people that have recently have taken the power in Israel aren’t as bad or even worse than those in Hitler’s Germany, but that the massacre itself happened and that it should be a spot of dirt in humanity’s history is a fact that no one can escape.
Great piece Allan and great recommendation as well. Here it is in many, many parts:

Fascinating, this is definately one I will have to seek out and, as always, Allan is a never ending well of suggestions with this series.

I think I will go into this one with caution though. It’s one thing to have the survivors tell their stories (ala SHOAH), but it’s an entirely different thing to bring a survivor back to the scene of the crime and watch them fall apart AS they tell their stories. I guess you have to have a strong stomach for this kind of thing but human suffering and senseless violence and murder is not something I take on with enthusiasm. Still, for every story told their should be an ear for listening and trying to fathom how something like this happens and is ALLOWED to happen.

Funny, I keep thinking of that dialoque that the great Max Von Sydow has in Woody Allens HANNAH AND HER SISTERS:

“Of course, though, it’s the wrong question. Knowing what we know about the world and the state that its in, the question shouldn’t be ‘How does this happen? ‘ but, ‘why doesn’t this happoen more often?’ ”

We live in times of madness, political scandal, lies and people who have more ideas than the gumption to bring change and healing to this planet. The times are wrought with suffering, crime, social instability and a disregard to the health of this actual blue marble we live on. She’s a living, breathing thing and war, genocide, disregard for pollution and bettering the environment all to make a buck and control the masses without our input is a fucking shame.

Maybe we need more films like this, FARENHEIGHT 911 and AN INCONVENIENT TRUTH to help us wake up and really do something about all this.

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